Emraan Hashmi, Vidya Balan go digital to promote Ghanchakkar

Vidya Balan's portrayal of Silk in The Dirty Picture won her a national award.

Taking a leaf out of the Harry Potter series, Bollywood marketing teams have come up with comic books and video games based on the movies they’re promoting. Whether it was RA.One (2011), or more recently Agent Vinod (2012), this marketing strategy has proven to be popular. And now for their next, Ghanchakkar, starring Vidya Balan and Emraan Hashmi, UTV Motion Pictures will release a video game as well.

A source close to the film says, “For the first time Emraan and Vidya will have a video game based on their reel-life characters. Emraan plays a safe breaker and Vidya is his quirky, Punjabi housewife in the film. The game will follow their journey together, exactly on the lines of the film’s story.” Rajkumar Gupta, the director of Ghanchakkar, will also be creatively involved in the making of the game. “The game will be a quirky thriller, just like the film, and the director is working at making sure of ensuring that,” says the source.

The source goes on to reveal that Vidya and Emraan will shoot for two days in the first week of May for the game’s graphics. “They have to do a very basic shoot so that from there on, the game can be digitally developed,” says the source. It will be released soon after the film hits the big screen sometime mid-next year. When contacted, Rajkumar confirms the news saying, “It will be very exciting to have a computer game in which Emraan and Vidya will play their characters from my film. We all are making sure that we add all the nuances (from the characters) into the game, to make it a nail biter.”